


The Rooms of Ruin

by inkandchocolate



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-19
Updated: 2010-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-09 14:08:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandchocolate/pseuds/inkandchocolate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apocalypse then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rooms of Ruin

**Author's Note:**

> AUTHOR'S NOTE: Written for When The War's Over, PROMPT: 34. The apocalypse is over, ironically over-shadowed by the outbreak of a global pandemic. Sam and Dean live in empty Manhattan Island - Dean hunts for food, and Sam works in the lab trying to work out a cure. But there are others out there.

_"All is silent in the halls of the dead." Eddie heard himself in a falling, fainting voice. "All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one."_  
— Stephen King

\---------------------

Manhattan:: July:: 2015

If he lives to be a hundred, Dean will never lose the tinge of bitterness he feels about the way things went down.

There's nothing like being a hero who saved the world. There's something less to be said for being the a hero who saved the world only to have the world go ahead and kill itself not 12 months later, victim of humanity's own hubris when it came to controlling things, infinitely tiny things that they created themselves in secret labs buried underground.

The end of the world did not come in the form of Lucifer and his unholy minions breaking free from the gates of Hell. It came from the vials of men and women bent on playing God.

On a good day, Dean decides they all fucking well deserve it. The irony is not lost on him. Of course a good day can go bad in all the time it takes him to stumble across some remnant of a child's toy in the rubble of a burned out building and then he's no longer sure of what to think.

So. The bitterness is always there.

He walks into the building he and Sam call home these days, a brownstone he's sure would have gone for a couple of million about five years past, when money still mattered and real estate was something to brag about. Even though he rolls his eyes whenever Sam starts going on about Pre-War this and plasterwork that, Dean has to admit that the place is amazing. Sixteen rooms, most of them untouched by the rioting and looting, cleaned from basement to forth floor religiously – and Dean means that in a literal sense as well as a figurative one – by the two of them, and fortified to withstand anything that might come their way. Zombies, vampires, demons, spirits… nothing is getting into the Winchester homestead.

No sense admitting that it's a fortress built to keep out things that don't exist anymore. That way lies madness, and in Dean's case boredom, which is worse.

"Sammy!" He puts the bag of salvaged food on the counter in the kitchen and walks through the long hall towards the basement door. There's no answer but then whenever Sam has his head deep into his research, he never hears anything but his own calculations and theories whispering inside his own head.

The door is heavy as hell, wired to a lock that even Dean hasn't been able to dismantle despite hours of dedication to the task. Boredom is a great motivator, and there is little in the house here that hasn't fallen victim to Dean's tinkering and attempts at modification. The lock remains the one glorious survivor. Best not to think about the microwave. Best to just give thanks that there wasn't anyone in the room when it self-destructed.

Dean's boots are heavy on the stairs, deliberately so. Years of solitude hasn't made Sam less likely to react badly to a shock. Dean bears a scar on his temple to attest to the fact that hunters do not lose their hair-trigger reflexes even when the things they needed those reflexes for have left this particular plane of existence.

"Sammy," he says again, careful to speak before he puts his head around the doorway.

"Yeah," comes the reply, distracted and slightly irritated. Sam's looking up when Dean does come into view. "Anything?"

A one word question that covers multitudes: did you see anyone else, did you see any*thing* else, did you find more supplies, did anything change?

Dean shrugs, shakes his head. "Nah. You?"

"I thought so but no," Sam admits as he pulls off gloves and snaps them towards the trashcan with an accuracy that speaks of thousands of repetitions. "I'm starting to think that there's nothing that'll work."

Dean rubs a hand over his face slowly. "We've already had this talk, you wanna do it again?"

With a huff of irritation, Sam rests his hands on his hips and juts his chin out briefly. "Yeah maybe I do. Maybe one of these times you'll admit that there's people out there, not just you and me, Dean."

"Yeah, ok," Dean says as he leans against the wall and crosses his arms. "And maybe, just maybe, you'll get over that freaking optimistic streak of yours that should have dropped dead with the rest of the world. How long, Sam? How fucking long has it been since we saw anyone outside of the mirror?"

Sam's jaw works before he answers. "Five years."

"Five years, five months and twenty days," Dean corrects him. "Long enough for people, any people, to make their way to a major city like we did, long enough for something to have happened. It's a big country but it's not that big."

Sam slams his hands on the table. "Can we not do this again? They're out there. They have to be. We're fucked up, dude, but there's no way we're the only people in the entire world who're immune. Stephen King killed the whole damn world off and even he let a percentage of a percentage go walking around."

Dean huffs and doesn't point out that Sam's now using a dead fiction writer – a dead fiction writer who Sam personally found to be so full of shit when he was alive that Sam mocked the man openly and often – as his rationale for human survival. Instead Dean gestures to the dead rats in the cages that line the work table between him and Sam. "People are gone. The only things left are the animals and if you weren't doing such a bang up job of keeping the population down around here, we'd be rat chow already."

"Wow, thanks for that visual," Sam grunts as he pokes at one of the cages, argument abandoned that easily for now. The dead rat rocks a little on its back, stiff paws curled up close to its body. "Besides, there's plenty of other things eating the rats. They're not getting ahead."

"Sooner or later, we'll be having ratloaf for dinner, things keep up like they have been," Dean says with a huff. He catches the little wrinkle of revulsion on Sam's face and it makes him grin. "What's wrong, Sammy, you suddenly too proud to eat your test subjects?"

"Did you have a reason to come down here or was it just time to annoy the shit out of me again?" Sam asks as he grabs fresh gloves and starts to pull the rats out of their cages, piling them into an empty shoe box, prepping for the trip to the incinerator.

"Anytime's the right time for annoying you," Dean admits cheerfully as he watches the morbid process. "You gonna be ready to eat anytime soon or are you still deep in Frankenstein mode?"

"If you're making meatloaf, I'll pass," Sam says, pushing the lid onto the box and holding it shut as he shakes his hair out of his eyes. He sees the grin on Dean's face and is struck by how rare a thing that used to be.

When did Dean start smiling often enough to have those lines around his eyes, crinkles that are marked faintly white against his tan even when he's not grinning, Sam wonders as he almost idly takes in the other changes he's been seeing but not making enough notes on. Dean's hair, longer than it's ever been and Dean's body, thinner now so that it's all muscle and none of the softness. Sam's throat works as he swallows down a sudden desire to ask out loud if Dean's been eating at all or just making sure Sam was fed.

Dean sees that expression change on his brother's face, a flutter of passing worry and sadness that he knows he somehow managed to put there despite his best efforts at keeping things light. Or at least what passes for light now that they're alone in the world and maybe always will be. "Dude," he says, quietly, softly, an odd little syllable wrapped up with a thousand meanings in the silence between them.

"Spaghetti," Sam says before either of them can actually lose it. "No meatballs, either." He clears his throat and turns away, shaking the box with the dead rat to give himself something else to listen to other than the echo of Dean's voice at the moment.

Dean lets out a low breath that he wasn't aware he was holding. "Wuss," he says as he watches Sammy's back all the way to the incinerator. Watches because even now, even here, that's all he's ever done and all he ever wants to do.

Watch and keep him safe, keep Sammy safe from everything he can manage. Through all the bad things that there used to be and all the nothing that seems to be left now, Dean's going to make sure it's always him and Sammy, safe and together.

That's not his job anymore. It's his everything.

Dean's good with that. And if the look on Sam's face as he turns back to find Dean watching him is any indication at all, Sam's pretty fine with it too.


End file.
